Relatively costly but highly effective file recovery. Anyone who manages multiple computers and valuable data should have it ready in their software toolkit.

Recoverable FilesWhen the program finally displays a list of recoverable files is when you'll need to use your expert knowledge. If you're recovering files from an NTFS-formatted hard disk, which is almost certainly what you've got in your computer, you'll need to search through a tree-formatted list of obscure filenames. If you're looking for files created by Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010, don't look under Documents in this list. Instead, look under Applications, in a folder named "zip-msword," because Word 2007/2010 documents are actually ZIP archives—though that's not something that even expert Windows users are likely to know.

It will also help if you can guess the file size of the files you're trying to recover, because (like all other data recovery programs), EasyRecovery Professional lists some tiny fragments of document files in its list of recoverable documents, but these fragments don't contain any useful data. If the list shows that a recoverable document is 25 KB in size or larger, then it may be worth recovering; don't waste your time trying to recover files with only 500 bytes.

The program won't let you preview the contents of recoverable files in any human-readable form, but you can right-click on a filename and choose Open if you want to view it. Oddly enough, on my system, when I clicked Open on a recoverable Word docment, a window opened for a split second and then closed, and I couldn't view the file. The only way I was able to review the contents was to tell the program to recover the file to another drive, and then open the saved copy of the file. Even more oddly, the program was able to open recoverable MP3 files when I clicked Open, but it couldn't open documents. I've asked Ontrack to comment on this, and will update this story when I hear from them.

I found it much easier to recover files from a formatted USB key that I tested, presumably because the FAT file system on the USB stick is much simpler than the NTFS file system on my hard drive. With a USB stick, even after it had been formatted, the program displayed the actual name of the original file, and I could open and recover files effortlessly. What impressed me most was that EasyRecovery Professional found dozens of music files on a USB stick after I had formatted the stick, and found them in less than ten minutes. Stellar Phoenix didn't find any of these files even after an hour of scanning.

Mail RecoveryAnother feature that makes EasyRecovery Professional stand out is its mail recovery feature. You tell the program which mail program created the files that you want to recover and it scans your drive for messages. You'll need to have enough expert knowledge to know that you choose the "Mozilla" option in order to recover messages from Thunderbird, aka Mozilla Thunderbird. In my tests, the program recovered hundreds of messages successfully, displaying each in a viewer. In contrast, Recuva also offered to recover deleted mail messages, but failed to do so.

Ontrack is the best data recovery app I've tested, though it certainly doesn't trounce the competition. Active@ File Recovery and Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery can be slightly easier to use once you know your way around their interfaces. Furthermore, Ontrack lacks a usable previewer and has an interface glitch that wouldn't let me open files before saving them. But Ontrack was superior to the competition in recovering files from a FAT-formatted USB stick and includes a "disk refresh" feature that may help to recover files from flaky disks. Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional is the program I'll run first when I need to recover lost files, and it ranks as PCMag's clear Editors' Choice for data recovery apps.

Ontrack EasyRecovery Profession...

Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional

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